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Follow the Journey from the beginning

A frequent mistake I see is for people to turn half the words in their message into hashtags in their Twitter tweet. Doing that reduces the tweet’s effectiveness. … resist the urge to put the # in front of too many words in the message portion of your tweet.

In a word, yes! But don’t just take my word for it. Neil Nyren, Senior Vice-President, Publisher, and Editor in Chief of Penguin Putnam, talked about the importance of an author’s web presence in an interview at Murderati.com, a blog about “Mysteries, Murder, and Marketing.”

“I just don’t get Twitter.” I have heard that baffled statement and cry of frustration so many times in recent weeks, I feel like there’s a cosmic echo. Most recently, I heard it from my good friend, Barbara Calderaro, who’s a fabulous singer here in Austin. (Barb and the Dave Cummings Band are the ones […]

I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about HootSuit, so today, I finally joined. I can already tell I’m going to love it! Now, I can post to Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace at the same time. And I organized my Twitter lists so I can view several groups side-by-side. What a time saver! Or, at […]

Have you ever signed online to do “one quick thing” and had your whole writing day vanish? I used to only battle the temptation of e-mail, but now there’s Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. Since joining the world of social networking, I confess, I have fallen victim to its seductive allure more than once, and wound […]

Before I braved the world of social networking, if I needed input on a major decision [like Website design], I’d simply bug my friends endlessly for their opinions…. This time, I decided to put my own advice from this blog into action and see what would happen if I used social networking. Wow, talk about Twitter and Facebook to the rescue!

Do you want to get your tweets seen by the world at large and build masses of followers? Well, here’s a tip I stumbled upon just by playing, and I LOVE HASHTAGS! It’s so simple, but so powerful. Normally, if you post a tweet, it’s only visible to people who are following you. Unless someone […]

How can something that sounds so fun be so confusing? Come on, Twitter? It’s cute. It’s friendly. It is NOT self explanatory! At least it wasn’t for me. I finally figured it out by diving in and playing around to see what would happen. I’ve decided that’s what it takes for me to learn my […]

As authors, our name is one of the most important thing we can own. In the age of the Internet it’s becoming increasingly hard to protect. Until a few weeks ago, I’d never even hear of the term “Cyber Squatter,” but boy did I ever fall victim in one of the worst ways possible….Basically, they’re holding my name hostage and they want $1,000 in ransom to release it.